This environment may only be started from the Cloud Sandbox
Mixed Emotions
We interrupt your regular programming with this special announcement:
Your company has acquired a company and you need to deploy some of its workloads into your cluster. One of the services is a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service, which calculates new policy prices based on driver data. Prior to the acquisition, the company experimented with containerizing this service and succeeded in running it on Docker. In order to take advantage of Kubernetes for additional orchestration, you will need to deploy this service alongside the rest of your Linux services and update the web app to communicate with the new service.
Challenge
Your team’s challenge is to deploy this new service along with the rest of the application into a single cluster without making changes to previous deployment files. Your team must also ensure the new service is integrated into the TripInsights application by upgrading the Trip Viewer application to use a different image that has already been deployed to your registry: tripviewer2:1.0. This application calls out to the WCF service in your cluster.
Things to think about
Much of what you’ve accomplished so far has given you the tools you need to incorporate this new service, however mixed workloads on Kubernetes and AKS can require you think differently about your overall cluster deployment, making sure it’s configured to support both OS types. Here are some questions to ask yourself when considering the addition of Windows workloads:
- What are the cluster features required to support Windows?
- How do you control the deployment to ensure Windows containers are directed to appropriate nodes?
- Are there changes to your cluster’s networking when adding Windows nodes to AKS?
About the Windows Service
The new service is a Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) service. It is already pushed to your registry as wcfservice:1.0 and listens on port 80 for requests.
About Trip Viewer 2
The updated Trip Viewer app expects an environment variable, WCF_ENDPOINT, in order to communicate with the service. You can test the communication by navigating to the UserProfile page of the app and clicking the ProcessRequest button for a user, which calls out to the WCF service and receives a response. If nothing happens, something isn’t right.
Desired Architecture
Success Criteria
- Your team successfully deployed the WCF application into the same AKS cluster as your Linux workloads
- Your team ensured that previous deployments are unchanged and unaffected
- Your team ensured that the updated Trip Viewer web app can successfully communicate with the WCF service
- Your team must demonstrate your cluster is overall “Healthy”
References
OpenHack
Hello and welcome to OpenHack, a challenge oriented hack event from Microsoft. You will be presented with a series of challenges, each one more difficult than the one before.
You should already be assigned to and seated with a team, with whom you will attempt to solve as many challenges as you can within today’s hack time.
You have been assigned a coach who will be your first point of contact, and is here to support you and answer questions during the hack. They will not, however, solve the challenges for you.
You may notice a resource group called teamResources in your Azure subscription. This resource group contains any pre-provisioned resources referenced in the challenges.
The Premise
You work for Humongous Insurance. One of their products provides customers the opportunity to qualify for lower car insurance rates. Customers can do this by opting in to use Humongous Insurance’s TripInsights app, which collects data about their driving habits. Your team has been assigned to modernize the application and move it to the cloud.
The TripInsights application, once a monolith, has been refactored into a number of microservices:
- Trip Viewer WebApp (
.NET Core): Your customers use this web application to review their driving scores and trips. The trips are being simulated against the APIs within the OpenHack environment. - Trip API (
Go): The mobile application sends the vehicle’s on-board diagnostics (OBD) trip data to this API to be stored. - Points of Interest API (
.NET Core): This API is used to collect the points of the trip when a hard stop or hard acceleration was detected. - User Profile API (
NodeJS): This API is used by the application to read the user’s profile information. - User API (
Java): This API is used by the application to create and modify the users.
The source code of all the microservices is available here.
The Challenges
Each challenge will lead you through a stage of the technical investigation as briefly laid out by your fictional CTO. These investigations become more technically challenging as you progress.
We do not provide guides or instructions to solve the challenges, just a few hints and documentation references that you may find useful. There are multiple ways to solve each challenge, and very likely some we haven’t thought of. We’re interested in seeing your own unique solutions to each problem, and you should absolutely work with your coaches and the OpenHack Team to validate your solution as correct.
One final tip: Read everything very carefully
The OpenHack team have worked hard to ensure each problem is solvable. All the details you should need are within the challenge briefs, which are very carefully written and worded to give you clues toward the solution. Reading them fully is the best way to figure out a solution, as small points can be easily missed. Your coaches will help to fill gaps in your understanding, provided you ask them the right questions.
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